HOWTO – Mailing lists with Mailman on Ubuntu 10.04

Bootlin is not in the system administration business (we offer free and open-source solutions for embedded systems), but we do our best to share whatever experience we acquire, and whatever code we produce.

We configured a KVM virtual machine to run our mailing lists, and we used Ubuntu 10.04, the long term support (LTS) version. Here are instructions based on this experience. You could also use the same instructions to install Ubuntu 10.04 on a tiny, low power ARM board. And if you wish to use a more recent version of Ubuntu, I expect the steps to be very similar.

Here we assume that your domain is example.com and that you install your mailing list software on lists.example.com. It is indeed a good idea to install your mailing list software on a different server. This way, you won’t mess up with your main web and mail servers. Not having CGI scripts running on it will also keep your main mail server more secure.

Install packages

Install the Apache web server. It will allow administrators to configure and manage the lists, and users to subscribe, unsubscribe and tune their subscription settings.

sudo apt-get install apache2

For e-mail delivery, I chose the Postfix MTA (Mail Transport Agent). Exim would have been a good solution too, but I am more familiar with Postfix, which is already in use on our main mail server.

sudo apt-get install postfix

Choose the Internet site option.

Now install the mailman package:

sudo apt-get install mailman

Select the languages that you want your mailing list interfaces to support. I chose English and French for the moment. To add more languages later, run:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure mailman

Configure the Apache web server

First copy the sample Apache configuration file provided by the mailman package:

cp /etc/mailman/apache.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/mailman

Now, in /etc/apache2/sites-available/mailman, enable short URLs by enabling:

ScriptAlias /mailman/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/mailman/

Also modify /etc/mailman/mm_cfg.py:

DEFAULT_URL_PATTERN = 'http://%s/mailman/'

The last step is to enable your mailman site in Apache:

sudo a2ensite mailman
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

You should now have a new symbolic link in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/.

Note: that’s the line containing only a dot character that allows to terminate the message.

If the receipient doesn’t receive this message, there is an issue in the way your mail server is configured. This could be because the firewall doesn’t allow connections to outside machines through tcp port 25. Anyway, look at the logs in /var/log/mail.* to get a clue. There is no point going on in this howto until you get this fixed.

Creating the mailman site list

Mailman needs a so-called “site list”, which is the list from which password reminders and such are sent out from. The default name for this list list mailman, though you can change this through the MAILMAN_SITE_LIST setting in /etc/mailman/mm_cfg.py.

Restart Mailman (/etc/init.d/mailman restart) and go to the administrative interface for your list. Under Non digest options, you will then be able to set the Should Mailman personalize each non-digest delivery? option to Full Personalization.

Then, you can set a custom footer for each recipient in the Footer added to mail sent to regular list members option. Here is an example:

Hello,
I having issue with mailman.
i got this error when i hit the URL

Bug in Mailman version 2.1.14

We’re sorry, we hit a bug!

Please inform the webmaster for this site of this problem. Printing of traceback and other system information has been explicitly inhibited, but the webmaster can find this information in the Mailman error logs.

hi! i have mailman running ok, so i need run from postfixadmin web interface a script in background post creation mailbox, mi question is whats a have to add in sudores for www-data web user can run: sudo /usr/sbin/add_members bla bla… same for sudo /usr/sbin/remove_members